The Great Buck Howard

There’s a scene in “Being John Malkovich” where every character in a crowded restaurant has John Malkovich’s face: the maitre’d, all the diners, male and female, the wait staff. Even the lounge lizard draped seductively across the piano wears the Malkovichian puss. I took it as a surreal montage of one man’s ability to shape-shift right in plain sight.

“The Great Buck Howard” is also a spoof built around John Malkovich but this one shrinks the vast array of characters in Malkovich’s range and pours them into one rather shallow vessel, the aging mentalist Buck Howard.

Buck is an entertainment dinosaur relentlessly stalking his audience in the faded former vaudeville theaters of small market cities. He is driven by the need to drink a daily dose of love from his remaining fans although he seems dismissive of those few individuals who shower him with their admiration. Without apparent friends or family, this hallow-eyed man crafts his decades old illusions with the unvarying solemnity of Levitical rites. He might be offering up sacrifices to the unseen forces which give him his ESP-like powers, the source of his belief that he is, in fact, great. He assiduously filters out anything, like half-empty theaters in seldom remembered towns, which might cast doubt over this self-talk, his greatest illusion.

The honorific ‘great’ was bestowed on Buck by Johnny Carson during the late host’s reign as the Pope of early late night television. Buck, a 61 time guest on the show, never caught a whiff of the ironic patina Carson lacquered onto the title. Was he so dazzled by the glow of the Hollywood Grail plopped onto his lap that he really believed he possessed powers and abilities far beyond those of mortal men? Or did Johnny just affirm what he alone had always known?

Decades after his 15 minutes of fame, Buck still believes what everyone else takes as a goof. He never stops talking about the new killer illusion he’s working on, his ticket back to the mountain top. It certainly appears like he’s whistling a happy tune while Godot dallies. But, in the end, Buck actually delivers his grand illusion with surprising results.

I liked this modestly entertaining film best when it broke through its downbeat, deadpan, put-on style and revealed the man behind the wizard behind the curtain. There are several scenes where the serio-comic Buck completes one of his stage illusions and then seamlessly steps out of the carapace of his act like a cicada molting its shell. He stands before us all gooey and unformed, a crooked boyish smile snaking across his face as he says “Isn’t that wild?” as if he can’t believe the amazing thing that has just happened. It is his personal fountain of youth, a magical place covered up and forgotten, like the Mayan temples swallowed whole by the tropical jungle. This was a great piece of acting because it revealed a touching and forgotten part of Buck without ever breaking the film’s scuffling, kitschy tone.

Watching this great actor strut and fret on the constrained stage of the illusionist's personality was a special treat. He played the role like a jazz trumpeter, muting down his sensitivity, intelligence and explosiveness to play a simpler song. He still hits all his notes -- Buck is fragile and tough, polite and nasty, cunning and slightly retarded – but it’s all done in miniature, pianissimo. There are no Sunday school polite, extremely smart serial killers lurking here, no dangerous liaisons, no lines of fire. Buck Howard may be testy, pompous and self-absorbed but he is not Ted Bundy. He's just there to entertain us and himself, and happy are we for the comic relief.